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theverycraftyvegan's review against another edition
adventurous
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5
First of all. SKIP THE PROLOGUE! My goodness that was an earful and I had absolutely ZERO chance of keeping it straight.
That being said, I’m so glad I stuck with it and finished the book. There were still so many (too many) characters and countries to keep straight, but the plot was easy to follow. Lots of excitement and adventure.
Honestly, it’s the typical boy child (Frodo; Harry Potter) with a wise old man (Gandalf; Dumbledore) who finds out he’s more than he seems (ring bearer, wizard) and goes on an adventure with a motley crew (Sam, Pippin, Mary; Hermione and Ron). You need another book (or two; or seven) to get to the end of their coming of age story but it’s worth the wait.
Granted, Garion was around before Harry Potter!
That being said, I’m so glad I stuck with it and finished the book. There were still so many (too many) characters and countries to keep straight, but the plot was easy to follow. Lots of excitement and adventure.
Honestly, it’s the typical boy child (Frodo; Harry Potter) with a wise old man (Gandalf; Dumbledore) who finds out he’s more than he seems (ring bearer, wizard) and goes on an adventure with a motley crew (Sam, Pippin, Mary; Hermione and Ron). You need another book (or two; or seven) to get to the end of their coming of age story but it’s worth the wait.
Granted, Garion was around before Harry Potter!
I will be continuing with this series over time. They’re all massive audiobooks that require a significant amount of time to work through. I’m thankful I can listen while driving and doing other things.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Xenophobia and Death of parent
Moderate: Injury/Injury detail, Fire/Fire injury, Blood, Violence, Death, and Death of parent
gandrshot's review
adventurous
funny
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
My relationship with these books is very complicated - they drive me insane, there's a lot of issues with the way they're written, I want to fist fight the author at any given time, I can't recommend them in good faith to anyone without a huge slew of disclaimers; they're also my favorite book series of all time. Pawn of Prophecy easily ranks as one of the best books in the series, probably my second or third favorite, and it being as good as it is is definitely why I got hooked on the series in the first place. For the purpose of this review, I will try not to get too much into the issues with the series at large unless they pertain specifically to Pawn of Prophecy itself.
The Belgariad is a coming of age story above all else, and follows the hero's journey fairly closely; Pawn of Prophecy pretty much completely encompasses the departure state of that. It is perhaps the slowest paced of the books, set mostly in Garion's early childhood (I believe it takes place on the farm he grew up on for the entire first half,) and does a lot of the heavy lifting setting the series up, but at no point did I feel bored with it or feel like the pace was too slow. By the very nature of covering the bulk of Garion's childhood, we see a significant amount of his character development in this book alone, but it does not deprive us of the chance to see him continue to grow throughout the series by leaving him with nowhere to keep growing. I actually really love the way it starts so slow and spends so much time in his childhood - it really lets us get a feel for how much changes for him, and sets up a significant portion of the world and our necessary understanding of it while still letting us experience the discovery of the rest of it at the same time as Garion, both in this book and the rest of the series. The plot of the entire series isn't particularly novel - most of the main plot beats are extremely predictable, so the book is carried along more by the smaller beats inbetween. One of Eddings' strongest areas, honestly, is being able to pace his adventures very realistically, and fill them with a lot of smaller and more mundane moments that give the story something very special.
I personally think the book's strongest point is actually its main cast of characters. Most people, I think, would disagree, as outside of Garion, Belgarath, and Polgara, pretty much every character is just a stereotype of their fantasy ethnicities - which is fair, they absolutely are, but I also found them to be well developed and nuanced enough to stand on their own as individual characters who are likable, interesting, and whose relationships and interactions in particular are one of the best parts of the book. I suppose they have to be - there's nothing particularly compelling or interesting in reading about six people trudging along the road with a cart full of turnips for several weeks, especially when Garion is kept in the dark about why they're on the road for the vast majority of it, so those interactions and relationships keep the otherwise very boring parts of the plot fresh and interesting to read while allowing the pacing to remain relatively realistic. The other half of this is Eddings' ability to write deeply and genuinely hilarious dialogue and character interactions, making the book an absolute joy to read.
Back on the subject of fantasy ethnicities, however, is the book's biggest issue, and that's the extremely weird and heavy handed fantasy racism. It is perhaps the least prominent in Pawn of Prophecy, but still very much present and impossible to ignore, and deeply, deeply uncomfortable at times. The premise that the book asserts is that each of the fantasy races/ethnicities of humans have inherent traits to them, generally cultural values and worldviews that would be informed by the environment one grew up in. To the credit of the series, it does try to emphasize that these are things that are taught, not somehow genetic or something you're born with, especially with one of the main characters whose parents were not actually from the kingdom they were ultimately raised by. Also to the credit of the series, it does eventually try to address the world's xenophobia, with the fact that characters coming from a specific culture seeing the values or customs of another culture may not understand those things, and may be inclined to immediately reject them or see them as "savage" or "barbaric," but asserts that that instinct needs to be unlearned and that it's wrong to treat different as synonymous with bad. It's clumsy, it doesn't always land, it isn't even always particularly consistent, especially in the first five books, but it's something. I would much rather have clumsy and trite "maybe racism is bad after all" messaging that just straight up unexamined racism.
Pawn of Prophecy, however, does not do this. Pawn of Prophecy, in fact, very much leans heavily into that fantasy racism and xenophobia, and does not reach the point of deconstructing or addressing these matters the way later books do. On the one hand, I suppose this is fair - Pawn of Prophecy is still very much in the process of setting up its world, of which that xenophobia is a key part, and it doesn't exactly have the time or the room to start deconstructing or criticizing any of this in any meaningful way. But all of this coupled not-so-subtly with the fact that the villains and the vilified part of the world are all very obviously coded as Asian, specifically mostly Middle Eastern, makes parts of the book outright painful to read. It is sincerely the worst part of the entire book, and it's at its absolute worst on a first read.
All in all, I do think the book is a great read, and I highly recommend the series to fans of high fantasy, with that caveat of being prepared for the racism (and some minor but mostly genre-typical sexism.) Eddings has a real knack for prose, his dialogue is deeply funny, and the story is genuinely such a joy to read, there's a reason I've reread it about seven different times in the last two years at this point.
The Belgariad is a coming of age story above all else, and follows the hero's journey fairly closely; Pawn of Prophecy pretty much completely encompasses the departure state of that. It is perhaps the slowest paced of the books, set mostly in Garion's early childhood (I believe it takes place on the farm he grew up on for the entire first half,) and does a lot of the heavy lifting setting the series up, but at no point did I feel bored with it or feel like the pace was too slow. By the very nature of covering the bulk of Garion's childhood, we see a significant amount of his character development in this book alone, but it does not deprive us of the chance to see him continue to grow throughout the series by leaving him with nowhere to keep growing. I actually really love the way it starts so slow and spends so much time in his childhood - it really lets us get a feel for how much changes for him, and sets up a significant portion of the world and our necessary understanding of it while still letting us experience the discovery of the rest of it at the same time as Garion, both in this book and the rest of the series. The plot of the entire series isn't particularly novel - most of the main plot beats are extremely predictable, so the book is carried along more by the smaller beats inbetween. One of Eddings' strongest areas, honestly, is being able to pace his adventures very realistically, and fill them with a lot of smaller and more mundane moments that give the story something very special.
I personally think the book's strongest point is actually its main cast of characters. Most people, I think, would disagree, as outside of Garion, Belgarath, and Polgara, pretty much every character is just a stereotype of their fantasy ethnicities - which is fair, they absolutely are, but I also found them to be well developed and nuanced enough to stand on their own as individual characters who are likable, interesting, and whose relationships and interactions in particular are one of the best parts of the book. I suppose they have to be - there's nothing particularly compelling or interesting in reading about six people trudging along the road with a cart full of turnips for several weeks, especially when Garion is kept in the dark about why they're on the road for the vast majority of it, so those interactions and relationships keep the otherwise very boring parts of the plot fresh and interesting to read while allowing the pacing to remain relatively realistic. The other half of this is Eddings' ability to write deeply and genuinely hilarious dialogue and character interactions, making the book an absolute joy to read.
Back on the subject of fantasy ethnicities, however, is the book's biggest issue, and that's the extremely weird and heavy handed fantasy racism. It is perhaps the least prominent in Pawn of Prophecy, but still very much present and impossible to ignore, and deeply, deeply uncomfortable at times. The premise that the book asserts is that each of the fantasy races/ethnicities of humans have inherent traits to them, generally cultural values and worldviews that would be informed by the environment one grew up in. To the credit of the series, it does try to emphasize that these are things that are taught, not somehow genetic or something you're born with, especially with one of the main characters whose parents were not actually from the kingdom they were ultimately raised by. Also to the credit of the series, it does eventually try to address the world's xenophobia, with the fact that characters coming from a specific culture seeing the values or customs of another culture may not understand those things, and may be inclined to immediately reject them or see them as "savage" or "barbaric," but asserts that that instinct needs to be unlearned and that it's wrong to treat different as synonymous with bad. It's clumsy, it doesn't always land, it isn't even always particularly consistent, especially in the first five books, but it's something. I would much rather have clumsy and trite "maybe racism is bad after all" messaging that just straight up unexamined racism.
Pawn of Prophecy, however, does not do this. Pawn of Prophecy, in fact, very much leans heavily into that fantasy racism and xenophobia, and does not reach the point of deconstructing or addressing these matters the way later books do. On the one hand, I suppose this is fair - Pawn of Prophecy is still very much in the process of setting up its world, of which that xenophobia is a key part, and it doesn't exactly have the time or the room to start deconstructing or criticizing any of this in any meaningful way. But all of this coupled not-so-subtly with the fact that the villains and the vilified part of the world are all very obviously coded as Asian, specifically mostly Middle Eastern, makes parts of the book outright painful to read. It is sincerely the worst part of the entire book, and it's at its absolute worst on a first read.
All in all, I do think the book is a great read, and I highly recommend the series to fans of high fantasy, with that caveat of being prepared for the racism (and some minor but mostly genre-typical sexism.) Eddings has a real knack for prose, his dialogue is deeply funny, and the story is genuinely such a joy to read, there's a reason I've reread it about seven different times in the last two years at this point.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Violence, and Xenophobia
Moderate: Racism and Death of parent
Minor: Misogyny
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